Business observability: From IT monitoring to driving digital transformation

As organizations adopt more cloud-native technologies, traditional IT monitoring is no longer up to the task of supporting wider business needs. Organizations need to shift toward more sophisticated models of monitoring and managing IT operations. The best way to accomplish this upgrade is to implement a business observability strategy.

Cloud-native technologies are driving the need for organizations to adopt a more sophisticated IT monitoring approach to satisfy the competitive demands of modern business. Business observability is emerging as the answer.

The ongoing drive for digital transformation has led to a dramatic shift in the role of IT departments. They’ve gone from just maintaining their organization’s hardware and software to becoming an essential function for meeting strategic business objectives. Today, IT services have a direct impact on almost every key business performance indicator, from revenue and conversions to customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

As a result, organizations have been forced to reevaluate what success looks like for the modern IT department and how they monitor and manage the performance of IT services.

Seeking insights from data

Every organization depends on data to make decisions. However, too often teams are forced to rely on disjointed data that lacks context, which leads to poor decision-making and wasted resources.

This problem has worsened as enterprise operational complexity has grown. In today’s digital-first world, data resides across dozens of different IT systems, from critical business applications to the modern cloud platforms that underpin them. Connecting the dots between these various silos of data to understand the relationship between the health of IT services and the business outcomes they enable has become a particular challenge.

The journey toward business observability

Traditional IT monitoring that relies on a multitude of tools to collect, index, and correlate logs from IT infrastructure, networks, applications, and security systems is no longer effective at supporting the need of the wider organization for business insights. This traditional approach presents key performance metrics in an isolated and static way, providing little or no insight into the business impact or progress toward the goals systems support. Often, these metrics are unable to even identify trends from past to present, never mind helping teams to predict future trends.

As a result, organizations need to shift toward more sophisticated models of monitoring and managing IT operations. With hybrid and multi-cloud architectures rendering organizations’ environments more complex and distributed, cloud observability has become increasingly important. Likewise, integrating metrics and traces with log data helps to identify crucial context that reveals the interconnections among and importance of signals from all levels of the network. These capabilities are essential to providing real-time oversight of the infrastructure and applications that support modern business processes. With cloud observability, organizations can make data-driven decisions to improve the health of their IT services and proactively mitigate potential risks.

Partners such as Deloitte provide key expertise in cloud observability and are instrumental for many organizations embarking on digital transformation. By leveraging Deloitte’s strategic insights, businesses can align their IT investments more closely with their overarching business objectives, driving both efficiency and growth.

However, the journey doesn’t end there. The final stage is developing true business observability. Business observability ensures that all IT activity and investment is aligned with an organization’s strategic business objectives by enabling superior data-driven decision making. Business observability provides insights to help address not only operational issues such as cost reduction and risk mitigation, but also customer-centric issues such as optimizing user journeys and creating personalized experiences.

Five ways business observability drives impact

There are several key advantages to making the transition to business observability, from mitigating the risks of adopting new cloud architectures and the challenges of data sovereignty, to rightsizing the IT estate and implementing greener technology. Five of the most important benefits of modern business observability are identified below.

1. Operational optimization. Across all sectors, system performance, infrastructure reliability, and transaction speeds are essential, whether it’s grid management for the energy industry or supply chain integration for retailers. An effective business observability strategy can help to meet these requirements by stabilizing the entire application stack, reducing operational expenditure, and preventing downtime in critical business systems.
2. Security and compliance. Organizations need to continually track transactions, user behaviors, and alerts to maintain security and compliance by detecting anomalies and indicators of potentially fraudulent activity or breaches. Business observability provides a cohesive approach to meeting these goals by offering a complete end-to-end view of application threats and vulnerabilities, assessed according to the level of potential risk to the enterprise.
3. Optimized experiences. By integrating data on user interactions, omnichannel behaviors, customer journeys, and purchasing patterns, organizations can take more effective action to deliver consistent and personalized experiences.
4. Resource optimization. Tracking and analyzing data from multiple sources enables businesses to optimize the performance of their IT services and prevent unnecessary downtime, while also reducing unnecessary resource consumption and carbon emissions through efficient asset utilization.
5. Agility and innovation. Organizations need oversight of the entire innovation pipeline, from ideation to implementation, to identify bottlenecks and streamline development and testing processes. Mature business observability capabilities enable businesses to reduce time-to-market for innovation by streamlining the product development cycle, while also providing key insights into user needs and the feasibility of potential feature additions.

Ultimately, organizations with mature business observability capabilities are better placed to use IT as a catalyst to drive better outcomes, streamline their operations, and mitigate risks, while unlocking greater customer satisfaction. This will help to place them at the forefront of the digital transformation landscape.